interconnect cabling

Projects General Guidance
4

James_C_B:
A great a device as this is and I have to take male pins and solder and heat shrink each pin to interconnect it to my sensing switches???
Has no company come up with a better cable interconnect scheme?

There are many different solutions. It depends on what you need and want.

If you are using development boards like the Uno, there are various shields that fit on top of the processor board that break out the pins in various ways and/or have sensors built in. For example there are sensor shields that have normal female pins, but also have a duplicate set of male pins with 5v, ground, and pin for each of the 20 pins, so that you could quickly attach a cable with 3 female wires all attached. Here is the Sensor Shield IV that yourduinio sells, that also has a set of bucked ports for the analog pins: http://arduino-direct.com/sunshop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=2

One thing to watch out for, is there are evidently two different ways to wire the 3 pins, one with 5v as the middle pin and the other with ground as the middle pin. I bought a no-name screw shield that had both types, ground as middle pin for the digital pins, and 5v as middle pin for the analog pins.

There is another variant of the Sensor Shield (V) that drops the buckled ports but adds more specific breakouts for xbee, bluetooth, etc: http://www.robotshop.com/dfrobot-i-o-expansion-board-arduino-v5.html

One thing that I've gravitated towards is a shield that is small enough that it fits on top of my UNO, but with a small breadboard or prototyping area, I can do smaller builds and then take it off the UNO, and put something else on, to allow for doing separate projects, or having a development and stable version of an evolving project: http://arduino-direct.com/sunshop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=93

As others have mentioned there are screw shields that you can connect wires to a screw terminal without soldering:

You can make your own cables using terminals like Pololu - Crimp Connector Housings.

You can use RJ-45 (ethernet, 8 wires) or RJ-11 (US phone) breakouts to enable you to connect several sensors at once with one cable: RJ45 Ethernet MagJack-Compatible - PRT-08534 - SparkFun Electronics. You can pick up the basic RJ-45/RJ-11 sockets at home improvement stores as well as electronics stores.

I've been starting to use 3 connector 2.5mm phono cables for interconnects, and you can get them with 2-4 connectors, depending on your needs (or in the 3.5mm size). Using RCA jacks that are used for composite video is another possibility.